TOBACCO FIRM AXED WARNING TO MOTHERS

Britain's biggest tobacco company made a decision in 1974 not to try to
stop pregnant women from smoking, even though it knew that unborn babies
could be harmed.

The revelations in internal documents belonging to British American Tobacco
could open a new front in the wars against the tobacco companies now being
fought by cancer survivors in Britain and in the United States. Martyn Day,
of the law firm Leigh, Day and Co, who represents some of them, said it
might now be possible for the children of women who smoked in pregnancy to
sue for compensation.

The papers show that at a meeting in May 1974, BAT's executives considered
making it worldwide policy "not to encourage smoking, i) by children ii) by
pregnant women iii) to excess". In a draft typed document, the second
category, pregnant women, is crossed through in ink several times. In the
final document, there are only two categories, and pregnant women do not
feature.

The health risks that cigarettes posed to the unborn child were by that
time well known in medical circles and to tobacco companies' advisers. Some
babies were premature and had very low birth weight (under five pounds),
which led to ill-health and possibly low intelligence, while others were
born dead or died soon after birth.

As early as 1957 the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology
published a paper on premature births linked to smoking. In 1972, two years
before BAT's meeting, the British Medical Journal published what Ann
Charlton of Manchester University describes as "the classic paper" by
Neville Butler and associates.

In Cigarette Smoking in Pregnancy: Its Influence on Birth Weight and
Perinatal Mortality, Prof Butler states that at least 30 per cent of women
were smoking regularly beyond the fourth month of pregnancy. If all those
women could be persuaded to stop, he wrote, "this might amount to a saving
of approximately 1,500 babies each year in England, Scotland and Wales".

The BAT papers are among 39,000 documents just put in as evidence in the
court case being fought in the US state of Minnesota. Others show how BAT
and other tobacco companies were well aware of the prevailing medical view.
A memorandum dated January 1969, belonging to another big tobacco company,
Philip Morris, says: "Now we have a study of the effect of smoking in
pregnancy which supports previous conclusions that smoking mothers produce
smaller babies. The position of the medical people is that smaller babies
suffer detrimental effects all through life."

Mr Day, who has 53 plaintiffs about to begin a court action in the UK, said
of the BAT documents: "It is utterly depressing that a multinational
company like BAT has taken such a cynical approach."

The documents raise a new issue, he said. He has details of about 500 more
smoking cases, and says he will re-open his files.

Clive Bates, director of ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), says he hopes
the issue will be raised at BAT's annual meeting on Friday. "Perhaps the
decision to scrub the pregnant women from the document was based on legal
concerns. The moment they acknowledged that there was something to
discourage, they would have admitted there was something harmful about
pregnant women smoking."

Mr Bates believes tobacco companies were keen not to have warnings about
damage to unborn babies on the packets - which did not appear until 1986,
the year that the Health Education Authority launched its anti-smoking
campaign.

Chris Proctor, the current head of science and regulation at BAT, said he
was surprised by the documents and did not know their context. "Why the
pregnant women are crossed out I have no idea," he said. "It certainly
looks odd. There's been a pretty consistent view in the company that we
should not be out there trying to undermine the public health authorities
on smoking and health.

"It has always been policy to advise women who are pregnant to go to a
doctor and the doctor would advise them not to smoke."